The Russian Data Collection Center occupies a key role in the history of nuclear reduction talks between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Discussions and treaties concerning nuclear reduction began when President Richard Nixon initiated the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT). American and Soviet negotiators produced the SALT I agreements in 1972. Composed of two treaties, the first SALT agreement limited antiballistic missile (ABM) systems at two sites for each nation. The second treaty placed a five-year freeze on the number of offensive nuclear missiles owned by each nation. The SALT I agreements did not restrict U.S. Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs), leaving the U.S. with the advantage in deliverable warheads. Therefore, SALT I did not restrict the continuation of the nuclear arms buildup.

President Jimmy Carter renewed the SALT talks in 1979. The Soviets and Americans agreed to a new treaty, SALT II, which placed a ceiling of 2,250 delivery vehicles (including long-range bombers, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, and Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles) for both sides. The treaty also limited the number of warheads per delivery vehicle, and capped MIRVed launchers at 1,200 for each. The Soviet Union would dismantle over 250 delivery vehicles, and the U.S. was allowed to expand its holdings from 2,060 to the new ceiling of 2,250. In order to win conservative votes in Congress for the treaty, Carter announced a military expansion program and deployment of cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles in NATO countries.

By 1982, the SALT talks were inactive, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) replaced them. At the Geneva summit meeting in 1985, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev agreed that strategic weapons should be reduced. At the Reykjavik, Iceland meeting in 1986, the two leaders came close to a major arms reduction agreement. However, Gorbachev and Reagan disagreed on the fate of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), Reagan's lauded "Star Wars" project that would enable satellites to intercept nuclear missiles en route to the United States. Despite the scientific community's opinion that the project would fail at a cost of billions of dollars, Reagan would not shelve the project in favor of a major arms reduction. Despite Gorbachev's misgivings over SDI, the two leaders signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987, banning all land-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe effective 1 June 1988.

A major element of the INF Treaty was to post observers of various facilities in both countries for thirteen years to ensure the treaty's agreements were being met. The INF Treaty allowed for mutual openness between adversarial nations, an unprecedented step before the treaty was signed and a grand experiment in implementing major disarmament of strategic weapons between the two countries. The Department of Defense created the On-Site Inspection Agency, which operated as both a data collection and escort agency. Its purpose was threefold: 1) to conduct inspections at 133 military sites in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; 2) to maintain around-the-clock monitoring operations at the Soviet assembly plant that produced SS-20s; and 3) to escort Soviet inspectors visiting the 26 military sites in the United States and Western Europe.

A Soviet inspection team observed Hercules Aerospace in Magna, Utah, a former Pershing II Production Facility at Hercules Plant I. In exchange, U.S. observers were stationed in Votkinsk, a former Soviet SS-20 facility. Both observation teams were limited to a 31-mile radius of the inspection sites. At the Magna site, a team of 30 observers rotated every two months. U.S. inspectors in the Soviet Union were subject to the same rules and regulations as the Soviet inspectors stationed in the U.S. The Russian inspectors had the authority to stop, weigh and measure all vehicles that did not fit certain dimensions, but they could not enter the Magna plant itself.

In 1991, President George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), reducing U.S. and former Soviet arsenals to 6,000 strategic warheads each by 2002. START's provisions allowed inspection teams to observe U.S. sites with nine hours notice. The treaty allowed Russian inspectors to observe 36 U.S. sites, and U.S. inspectors observed 65 sites in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Under START, the first Hercules facility subjected to inspections was the Tekoi Test Range on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley, where Hercules once tested motors for Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles at the site.

The Russian and U.S. inspectors left their respective facilities May 2001 in accordance with the treaty.